This got pinned for a reason! So much wow. Thanks SirDubDub! I think it safe to say you could solicit the current BT game makers like MWO or the new Harebrained guys for an opening cinematic contract!

You know, with CW coming out of 'beta' a great intro animated scene would do wonders to grab the attention of the new Steam players that will be checking the game out. Seriously, you should make a proposal to them!

Agreed.... would like to see a serious take at live action and quality CGI.... Mechwarrior and Battletech have a great opportunity with Franchises like Marvel and World of Warcraft making it to the big screen. The storyline of the clan invasion and counter attack is a goldmine of scripts for great action movies!

Who knows... may even fit well with Michael Bay, Neill Blomkamp, or Peter Jackson's style!

LocationHiding in a cake, left in green city called New A... something.

Posted 23 June 2016 - 01:34 AM

Strattus, on 23 June 2016 - 12:36 AM, said:

Mechwarrior and Battletech have a great opportunity with Franchises like Marvel and World of Warcraft making it to the big screen.

Yeah, no. Even Japanese are drifting away from mechs, let alone the west.

Even if west ended up finally realizing the amazingness that is giant robots, I really doubt it would be through Battletech, which is old-fashioned and has a massive legacy behind it. It's akin to asking anime fans of today to go watch Dougram/VOTOMS or other old mecha anime.

Agreed.... would like to see a serious take at live action and quality CGI.... Mechwarrior and Battletech have a great opportunity with Franchises like Marvel and World of Warcraft making it to the big screen. The storyline of the clan invasion and counter attack is a goldmine of scripts for great action movies!

Who knows... may even fit well with Michael Bay, Neill Blomkamp, or Peter Jackson's style!

There was already an attempt earlier in like 2005 I think it was or something for a battletech movie but it lost money quite quickly and broke apart.

However there is a huge gold mine awaiting here... but I do not know if a movie is the best... sadly it seems animations would be the best to get a battletech movie underway... for eg Girls Und Panzer which was just a guy making an anime style series about his favourite game World of Tanks and now there's merch, a movie, etc...

Something similar can happen to Battletech (not necessarily "Anime" but animated in general or CGI) but it needs the battletech fans to support it to grow anywhere fast.

Adridos, on 23 June 2016 - 01:34 AM, said:

Yeah, no. Even Japanese are drifting away from mechs, let alone the west.

Even if west ended up finally realizing the amazingness that is giant robots, I really doubt it would be through Battletech, which is old-fashioned and has a massive legacy behind it. It's akin to asking anime fans of today to go watch Dougram/VOTOMS or other old mecha anime.

Just because it isn't in the mainstream doesn't make it not able to be a hit. Transformers was already dun and dusted before the first series of movies by M.Bay brought it back to life and despite some criticism I really think the first two movies were quite good. (M.Bay didn't want to make further movies after 2 or 3 hence the shobby continuity)
Of course though I do not want Battletech getting a M.Bay treatment... despite every trailer for an MW game involving a critical explosion which in lore was very rare....

But let us take a few steps back. We do not even need to go in about Mechs to have a BattleTech movie- yes i know, Mechs has always been the focus but it doesn't NEED to be the main focus...

BattleTech has a wealth of lore, history, etc...

Ranging from goliath sized tanks roaming the battlefield amongst hover crafts and heavy infantry support with hand held mortars, dirty city combat, long range flame throwers and pulse lasers. To having high velocity aerospace fighters that can exit the atmosphere or reenter...

We cna easily have a movie centered on the soldiers on foot; or an aerospace jockey in the skies (or space)...
We can easily make a movie about tanks; or not even focus specifically on specific people and have an overview of an overall battle with the main character rather being a civilian caught in the cross fire trying to escape the clan invasion or what ever and hiding in occupation/ trying to survive in occupation if the escape didn't turn out well at all or what ever.
This can go hundreds of ways... and we didn't talk about to much about the fact we also got heavy Space battles too...

We can easily spread through many genres that is war related through these arms, vehicles, and battlefields but that's not the juiciest part.

What I love t he most of BT is the fact that after the first succession war there are planets bombarded so heavily, fought over for years, or just cut off in general fro mthe out side world that the planet lost space transport and is forced into the 17th centuary in terms of technology. Back to swords, shields, bows, crops, windmills, etc...
You can have a fantasy/ midevial like setting with odd creatures (native alien species which is decently documented in BT but will create the illusion of "fantasy") until we see after a chain of events our main protagonist finding the overgrown ruins of a say overlord dropship. Completely ruining the illusion of it being in a 'ye old days' setting into a post post-'apocalyptic' situation after heavy technological losses.

Or instead of discovering the old technologies long lost or what have you... we could have the inner sphere searching for tech again and have a reconnection... or the clans coming in looking for LosTech scraps.

There's literal thousands of ways we can take this and we can have a movie not even combat related at all, could be one of the normal genres we see in the mainstream (but please not a comedy... wouldn't want that to be the first Battletech film out...) in the setting of BattleTech... bidding and gambling on who is gonna win on the next Solaris VII match, hear of news of random invaders in the periphery and controversy. Your daily dose of "Liao is evil!" propoganda. etc....

Of course I would love a mech orientated BT film but I always wanted to see the other directions expanded...

Agreed.... would like to see a serious take at live action and quality CGI.... Mechwarrior and Battletech have a great opportunity with Franchises like Marvel and World of Warcraft making it to the big screen. The storyline of the clan invasion and counter attack is a goldmine of scripts for great action movies!

Who knows... may even fit well with Michael Bay, Neill Blomkamp, or Peter Jackson's style!

Keep the monstrosity that is Michael Bay away from anything I remotely care about.

LocationHiding in a cake, left in green city called New A... something.

Posted 23 June 2016 - 07:34 AM

Nightshade24, on 23 June 2016 - 03:22 AM, said:

*ideas*

I'm not saying that Battletech would be a bad setting for a movie or that you couldn't make an interesting story in it.
It's just it has a burden of a franchise behind it. Franchise not related to cinematography.

Imagine people getting their first taste of Harry Potter through Prisoner of Azkaban or GoT starting in media res during one of the later novels in the series and saying, "Hey, look we're setting this in a universe you know diddly squat about but has this massive legacy spanning several novels."
That is exactly how you don't want to start your movie because a movie, by its virtue, must be self-contained in the scope of cinema. Movie-goers do not care about the franchise, they care about the movie(s). Battletech didn't start out as a book series which was then expanded into TT and that would be its own undoing because there is no real properly constructed entry point (just look at the games and subtract all those which started in 3025 which would be the franchise's origin).
We're not Dune level doomed but an adaptation of bigger scope is simply not happening.

Even if someone did take up the monumental task, the road to success would be pretty clear and that would be something akin to what the games did. Create another IP related to Battletech and Mechwarrior but with its own identity. Look at the setting and strip down everything but what made the setting appealing/its basic premise and build a good movie on top of that. Which is what, say, the Transformers movies did. Remove everything from Transformers, keep the appealing stuff (fight of good vs bad through transformable giant robots) and premise (they bring their war to other species) and just build up from there. Of course, that would simply throw away all the lore, the dates, the individual machines and how they work, the characters,.... and at that point, the BTech fanbase would simply join the ranks of hundreds of others with successful movie adaptations just like Transformers.

And just like your example about Transformers aids your argument, the example of Marvel movies destroy it. You CAN take a portion of a big universe/lore and use it as a starting point (clan invasion, like MW2 Mercenaries already did?) to educate moviegoers who know nothing about the IP. Just be careful that the events you choose are important or pivotal enough, and from then on you can even reorder the chronology for successive movies, like X-men did. No need to change the mechs, or the character names, or even the aesthetics. Sure salty fanbois will cry, but salty fanbois cry about anything anyways.

IraqiWalker, on 23 June 2016 - 03:31 AM, said:

Keep the monstrosity that is Michael Bay away from anything I remotely care about.

LocationHiding in a cake, left in green city called New A... something.

Posted 28 June 2016 - 04:50 AM

Don't the Marvel movies do the same thing?

Marvel Cinematic Universe and all that. New designs which are completely departed from the originals, completely original stories that have nothing to do with the comic continuity and a whole new crossover world...

Why is that different from what I've said is the only way to make a successful movie adaptation?

I'd love to see a movie, BUT, and that's a big but, given the movie would have to end with the clans ultimate defeat you'd have only a limited audience, I.S. fans would see it, clan fans would save their money and just play MWO or the MW2, MW3, MW4 for free.
It wouldn't appeal to a large audience like Pacific Rim or even (god forgive me that I bring this movie to mind) Robot Jox.
No need for spoilers as everyone would know the ending, if the ending was changed then they'd lose the I.S. audience.
Losing proposition best left to fan creation.

I liked it before I watched it. I recognized a lot of the art from other places, but it still got me going. I so wish they would actually make a good BattleTech movie.

And ATTAKHAN, I am a lifelong member of Clan Ghost Bear, and I would watch a movie that ended with the Clans' defeat, just because it was BattleTech. I would even donate to it even though I am essentially a broke college student. I just wanna see a live action BattleTech film! Also, it wouldn't have to end with the Clans' defeat (though I guess you were springboarding off of the given trailer)--they could do the Fed-Com Civil War, the Jihad, Succession Wars, intra-Clan wars, or even local world squabbles. There is plenty of lore to choose from. Imagine a movie about the Annihilation of the Not-Named Clan. Of course, the obvious ones would be the Clan Invasion or the Kerensky Exodus.

But regardless of the topic, I just wanna see a BT movie. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY, SOMEONE!